Wenya He, Yingying Zhang, and Tsinghua and Northwest School colleagues have developed a silk-based wearable patch which measures glucose, ascorbic acid, lactate, potassium, sodium ions and uric acid concentrations in sweat.
Sensors are embedded in a woven graphite-silk fabric. Conductivity is enhanced using graphite doped with nitrogen atoms. The flexible patch is applied to the skin on the arm and used to collect data from sweat for the 6 biomarkers.
Epicore Biosystems, with technology developed by Roozbeh Ghaffari at Northwestern, and Eccrine Systems, spun out of Jason Heikenfeld’s work at University of Cincinnati, are rapidly advancing the use of sweat-monitoring wearables.